Mailbox Monday

Welcome to Monday Mailbox, the meme started by Marcia and currently on tour around the internet. This month is being hosted BookNAround. This past week's mailbox arrivals:

I was fortunate enough to get two great looking books this past week:

The Secret Keeper from Simon & Schuster for review

I requested this one months ago and I didn't think I was going to get it, and WHAM - there it was.

The Library Journal describes it...

Classic Morton: 16-year-old Laurel Nicolson sits dreaming away in her childhood tree house when she spies her mother speaking to an unknown man. Later, Laurel witnesses a terrible crime. But it's not until 50 years have passed that she can ask her mother the pertinent questions—which leads to a story involving three strangers in wartime London. Morton's best-selling work is always classy and nuanced.

The Art Forger from LT for review

I finally got caught up on my LibraryThing ER books so I didn't feel bad about requesting this one. And I got it!

Library Journal describes this one...

By page two of this novel, the reader is fully engrossed into the world of struggling artist Claire Roth, nicknamed "The Great Pretender" who copies famous paintings for a website called Reproductions.com. When Aidan Markel, the handsome owner of a prestigious gallery, offers her a show of her own work in exchange for forging a painting, she reluctantly agrees. He brings two paintings to her studio, a supposedly original Degas called After the Bath and a work by an obscure painter of the same size and age. A Degas expert, Claire determines that the Degas in her studio is itself a forgery, and she's the only who knows. Stripping the paint off of the lesser-known work, she creates another forgery, doing such a good job that art authenticators think it is the original Degas, missing from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum since 1990. (Thirteen works worth over $500 million were actually stolen from the museum at that time.) Aidan lands in jail when the copy is seized by the FBI, and Claire will be too unless she finds the original Degas. In this enthralling intrigue, the yearning to own an original work of art is thoughtfully explored, and the text is interspersed with letters from Gardner herself, describing her relationships with the artists whose work she collected. VERDICT This well-researched work combines real elements (though After the Bath never existed) with the understanding that the art world is as fragile and precarious as the art itself, particularly for young hopefuls.

Two great looking books, can't wait to crack them open!